Backups

From CCRMA Wiki

Your home directory is backed up automatically each day to backup server. You can access these daily images by going to:

/usr/ccrma/backup/<username>

There, you will see directories with names like '20070804,' which corresponds to the date of the backup.

Inside this directory you'll see another directory named 'tree.'

/usr/ccrma/backup/<username>/<date-directory>/tree

'tree' corresponds to your home directory. So, in side it you'll see all the files and dictories backed up on that date. This is an 'image' or snapshot of what your home directory looked like at backup time. Backups are taken sometime between midnight and 8am generally.

You can read from (copy from) these directories, but cannot write to them.

So, if you deleted a critical soundfile from your home directory (e.g. ~/sounds/best-sound-ever.ogg) you could copy that file back into your home directory by visiting the most recent date directory where the soundfile exists and copy it back, somewhere into your home directory, like this:

The backup images are retained inside a 3 month window according to the following schedule:

0-2 weeks

2 - 5 weeks

5 - 12 weeks

beyond 12 weeks

Daily

MWF

F

none

That is, for two weeks back from the present day, you have an image available for each day. Further back than two weeks, but less than five, you have MWF images available (T,Th,Sa, and Su images have been deleted). From five to twelve weeks, you have only each Friday's image available (M and W are deleted), and after twelve weeks, all images are deleted.

Backup Exceptions

There is a system in place which will allow you to prevent certain files from being backed up. You would want to do this if you have large sets of source material, generally sound or video files, which you have already backed up to DVD, but need on the network drive for some reason (e.g. to be accessed for computation or analyis of some sort). This would be data that is on the order of Gigabytes. You can exclude this data from backups by: